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we're really excited to use the jameson

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space telescope to look for signs of

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life in the atmospheres of potentially

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habitable planets

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and in particular we're searching for

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signatures called biosignatures which

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are remotely observable signs of life

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now on earth some of the important

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biosignatures of our own planet are

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oxygen which is produced by oxygenic

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photosynthesis that of course we all

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know plants do that there's all sorts of

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microbes that also do oxygenic

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photosynthesis and a lot of people

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consider it the dominant metabolism of

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our planet

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another important bio signature of earth

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is methane a methane on our planet is

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produced by microbes that live in a

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variety of places ranging from

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hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the

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ocean to the guts of cows and they

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produce most of the methane that's in

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our planet's atmosphere

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so these are important gases that we

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want to look for in the atmospheres of

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exoplanets with the james webb space

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telescope but you also have to really

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carefully interpret that gas that is

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does it make sense for life to produce

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that given bio signature in that given

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environment and then really importantly

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you also want to rule out what are

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called biosignature false positives

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biosignature false positives are

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non-life ways that a planet can fool you

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by producing you know something that

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looks like a bio signature but it's not

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actually a biosignature because it's not

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produced by life it's produced by some

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other process like vulcanism or

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atmospheric chemistry or you know any

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other process that doesn't involve life

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so all this together means this is a

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really exciting search but it's going to

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be complicated and if we detect

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something that we think is a bio

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signature when we look at an exoplanet

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it might not immediately be definitive

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it might be ambiguous until we collect